Braden Pollock, Legal Brand Marketing — Selling Premium Domains and Providing Top-Tier Leads
Braden Pollock is an angel investor, tech-startup genius and the entrepreneur behind companies such as Sultra, The Grooming Network, ScienceFiction.com and more. But perhaps what he’s best known for in the legal industry is Legal Brand Marketing, a lead generation source for law firms all over the country, providing immediate, high quality, vetted leads.
Join us as Braden tells us how he went from selling domains for $7 to millions of dollars, why his leads are a great compliment to your SEO strategy and why you should consider email leakage when choosing a URL.
What’s In This Episode
- Who is Braden Pollock ?
- Where does Braden’s entrepreneurial spirit come from?
- What is a premium domain?
- How Braden manages so many businesses simultaneously.
- Why Braden won’t sell pineapple for less than seven figures?
- Why “staying out of the way” is the best thing for Braden’s companies.
- What you need to consider when purchasing a domain.
Braden Pollock
There are names like pineapple .com, which I own, um, pineapple .com will never be used to sell pineapples. As a matter of fact, Dole reached out to me years ago and they offered like $35,000 or something, which is preposterous. And so, you know, pineapple .com is a seven figure name and I’ve turned down multiple six-figure offers. Um, but it’s, it’s. For sure. A seven figure name.
Chris Dreyer
Having a catchy name for your law firm might be memorable, but in this day and age, it isn’t worth much if you can’t secure the domain name too. And if you’ve got a great name in mind that you can’t seem to find with your run of the mill domain providers, chances are my guest today already has it and is waiting for your call.
Braden Pollock
You can’t be .net and be consumer-facing because people are going to screw that up. They’re gonna, they’re gonna go to the .com when they type out the email address, they’re going to default in their head to .com. And so there’s going to be what we call email leakage. Um, it’s like a toll-free number. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind? 800. Yeah, but 888, 877, 866, 855… Like these all exist, but that’s not what our brain defaults to.
Chris Dreyer
You’re listening to The Rankings Podcast, the show where top marketers and elite personal injury attorneys share their stories about getting to the top and what keeps them there. My guest today is Braden Pollock, owner of Legal Brand Marketing. Braden’s company specializes in lead generation using a host of perfectly optimized domains for offering a great way to supplement the organic lead generation of your SEO. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. SEO is all about the first page and that’s also where we’d like to start our show. Here’s Braden Pollock, owner of legal brand marketing.
Braden Pollock
How did I become an entrepreneur? Um, I guess, cause I couldn’t really work for anybody else. I didn’t, I didn’t have a choice. I always had that, that fire, my belly ever since I was a little kid, I just never pictured myself working for other people. I remember when I was in, uh, high school, I was in play production and uh, People would write in the programs about how they were going to become famous actors. And I would write that I’m going to graduate, go to college and then start a business.
Chris Dreyer
Well, you know, one, uh, one of the, one of the focuses that are really want to key in on is, is your legal expertise and, and particularly, the premium domain name side. So how did you get started investing in these premium domain names? How did you notice the trend and like this opportunity to acquire these domains?
Braden Pollock
That actually came from the marketing company. So when we started Legal Brand Marketing, uh, we were, we were representing DUI lawyers only, and they would come to us for everything. And this is we’re going back 16 years, right. So, so I was their internet guy. I mean, literally lawyers would call me up and ask me like why they weren’t getting their email. Um, and so, so we started building websites just, just because of demand. Uh, and so we would, um, take an order to build a website and we were to acquire domain for them. This is hand registering domain names. I wasn’t even charging because it was $7 at the time and I’m charging them whatever it was $4,000 for a website or $10,000 website. So I’d throw it in. And, um, I came across somebody, I don’t know if he emailed me or I emailed him and he had some really good legal domain names and he wanted like a few hundred bucks a piece. And so I just reached out to my clients and I said, Hey, you know, do you want these? And they had said, and most of them said yes. And I just resold them for exactly what the guy was asking like 300 bucks or 400 bucks. But the guy that said, if you take them all, you know, I’ll sell you the whole thing for $5,000 or something. And I collected most of that money from the names I resell based on this guy’s pricing, cause I wasn’t upselling and ended up with this small portfolio with extra names, um, and kind of discovered this aftermarket that I didn’t know existed. And, and then after a year or two, I had a couple of hundred extra domains that I had registered a few and I talked to a friend of mine that was a sales manager for .tv. And so I called him up and I said, you know, you understand this domain stuff. Um, so have a couple of hundred domains. Is there any way I can monetize them? They’re just sitting there. They’re all paid up for the remainder of the year. And he said, park them. And I’m like, what the hell is parking? And, um, so he explained to me, there’s these parking companies, you pointing your, your DNS towards these guys servers, they populate the domain with a landing page. So somebody types in the domain name, a landing page, a dynamically populates with ads, and then you get a cut of the, of the ad revenue, um, which was mostly a Google fee. And, um, I was like, great. So I did that for a few months and had this suddenly had extra revenue and then it dawned on me one day. I mean, literally I was sitting at my desk and I was kind of looking at these domains. I was thinking about it and it struck me that people that were typing in whatever the domain was, you know, a DUI, Virginia .com, I realized those are my clients that I’m now sending to somebody else for. 12 cents. And some of the, and sometimes I was actually there, my ads, and so I would be charged $8 for a click and then that click was w was actually coming back to me through my network. And I was then getting my rev share, which was like 14 cents. Um, and so when this, when this struck me, I then redirected all of those domains to appropriate pages on my website. Um, and then, um, so, so now I kind of understand the means and there’s this aftermarket and parking. And then there was a conference that was in LA, which is where I live. And so I went to this conference and discovered there’s this entire world of domain investors out there and premium names. And there was an auction and names of selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars. I sat in an auction for sex .com and it went up to $9.3 million. And the guy said, no, And walked away because it didn’t hit the reserve. I couldn’t believe it. It ended up selling a month later for like 12 and a half million.
Chris Dreyer
Wow.
Braden Pollock
Um, and so I was just fascinated by this world. I continued to buy legal domains, um, and, and resell them. And as I was going to the conferences, then I started speaking at the conferences and it kind of became a fixture – now I am the kind of, of the industry moderator. So I travel all over the world and, um, yeah, learned about premium names. So not just legal names, but premium, uh, names being one word dictionary word .com names. And, um, in kind of being in the industry and going to the auctions. I learned about those and then kind of shifted my focus from the legal names to these higher value, one-word .com names. So here I am as a, it’s kind of a side hustle, but it, it, it makes a fair amount of money.
Chris Dreyer
That’s a great story. It’s kind of interesting. Cause I see a lot of these companies, but it’s like, how did it get started? How did they develop their portfolio? And you know, just pointing just, I just want to point out to our audience. We’re talking about the cream of the crop types of domains, just in the legal specific, you’ve got expungement .com, divorce.attorney, some just really premium domain names. And then on the other side, things like pessimists .com, you’ve got, you know, just all kinds of these, just illegal good one. So let’s jump in to the practical use of these and the branding use of these. So, how, how do they influence branding? How do they, you know, not only from the branding side, but also from do they affect SEO? I know Google has said that they cracked down on, you know, the benefit of the domain names, but did they really crack down from an SEO standpoint? You know, the use of these, how do you see these being used by your, your buyers?
Braden Pollock
So there are in domain investing, it’s like really any other kind of investment, um, alternative asset class. So there are categories. So, so for example, there’s people who invest in livestock. I don’t know the first thing about livestock, but I’m sure there are things to know. You don’t just go in and buy a bunch of cows, right? There’s different kinds of cows in different ages and different values and have no idea. Right. Domains are the same way. Um, if we talk about, um, let’s say premium .coms, there are names that what we call EMD or exact match domains. So in your world, uh, accident, attorney .com, right? Like that’s a premium, legal name. Right. I have a number of names like that. Um, so that’s an exact match. So it relates exactly to the industry, but there are brandable names. Um, it, a couple of kinds of brandable names. There are names that mean nothing right? Made up words. And then there are names like pineapple .com, which I own, um, pineapple .com. Will never be used to sell pineapples. Uh, as a matter of fact, Dole reached out to me years ago and they offered like $35,000 or something, which is preposterous and, you know, right far less…
Chris Dreyer
Right. I think I bought my domain for something like that. Like 30,000 – rankings.io. And that’s not even near the level of quality.
Braden Pollock
Right? Um, no. So, so, you know, pineapple .com is a seven-figure name and I’ve turned down multiple six-figure offers. I made, I think the highest is probably like 200 grand or something. Um, but it’s, it’s for sure a seven figure name. Um, and there are, there are seven figure domain sales weekly. There are eight figure domain sales. All the time. And I would say at least once or twice a month, they’re just not public because who can afford to buy a eight figure domain name, right. A company that does something else. Right. And so this is, they just bury it in their marketing spends is not what they do. So they’re just not public with it. And they’re almost all under NDA. I don’t sell names under NDA. Um, you know, I always get that clause in the contract and I strike it and I send it back and the lawyer comes back and wait, you struck the confidentiality clause. I’m like, because it’s, I’m not going to be under an NDA. Um, I will not divulge who the buyer is because that’s not meaningful, but I want the comps out there. Because I’m part of this industry and that’s, that’s meaningful to me. And we always know who the buyer is because they start using the domain name anyway, but most big sales are under NDA. So we never hear about them. Voice .com sold last summer for $30 million. Um, and it was bought from a public company. So it was, it was released. Um, but you know, they, they didn’t want to sell it. So the buyer just kept going up and up and up until they had to, I mean, it was, it was that $30 million was more than their entire year’s, uh, revenue so they had to say, yeah.
Chris Dreyer
So, so let’s, so you’ve got the branding component, you know, it’s easy to say one word it’s it’s stronger. It’s it’s it brings a presence and clout just to some of these, you know, some of these domain names and then you have that’s memorable.
Braden Pollock
Yeah. You, you need it. You mean you need a word that is, that is, um, not necessarily descriptive, right? But it needs to be something that is going to be remembered. Um, I sold, um, packed .com for three 50 to a big company, and they were operating on a, on packet.net. And you can’t, you can’t be.net and be consumer facing because people are going to screw that up. They’re gonna, they’re gonna go to the .com when the type out the email address, they’re going to default in their head to .com. And so there’s going to be what we call email leakage. Um, it’s like a toll-free number. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind? 800. Yeah, 888, 877, 866, 855, like these all exist, but that’s not what our brain defaults to.
Chris Dreyer
Braden is. Absolutely correct. There are some patterns that we’ve simply been conditioned use like .com or 1-800. They’re so familiar, in fact, that whenever we type in an address or punch in a number, .com or 1-800 comes out through a muscle memory, regardless of dial code or domain name. But Braden isn’t just, and the business of buying and selling domains, he uses some of those URLs to generate leads for law firms, too. So I asked him how exactly this side of his business can help attorneys. Like let’s, let’s say hypothetically, I’m a St. Louis personal injury attorney, and I’m looking to grow my PI firm. How does your organization help me grow?
Braden Pollock
Well? So what we do is we serve, we sell our leads based on, on practice area and geo, right? So it can be, you know, zip code, county, state, right. Um, And, um, we have a lot of attorneys that buy more than one practice area because not everyone focuses, but so, uh, so, so you would by St. Louis as geo and MVA is the practice area. Um, we also have, um, personal injury and other related categories, but, um, but we break it down and then we, so just qualified, vetted leads. Um, And if it’s a bunk lead, you know, dispute it, we will, we’ll do, what’s called a post qualification – make sure that it is a bad lead because sometimes it’s not, sometimes it is a good lead. Um, so we, we call it and if we get the, the client on the phone and then we just taught, transfer it back to that attorney and don’t accept the dispute. But, uh, I think there’s a lot of lead gen companies that aren’t trusted because they are buying their leads from God knows what sources they don’t vet those. And then the lawyers calling these leads that are just bunk leads, right. And, um, then they dispute it, then they get upset because they’re wasting their time. And so we vet all of our sources because we deal with lots and lots of publishers. And, uh, we accept, we expect except the disputes, if they’re not good. And if, if someone Googled us now, I don’t think you would find anything negative from anybody that’s ever been a client, um, because you know, we stand behind what we do.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah. So, so let me jump in here and I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus, but let let’s. So there’s some well-known lead generation companies, you know, there’s 4LegalLeads, there’s Thumbtack. There’s Nolo, um, you know, FindLaw used of sell leads is the main differentiator where you vet these leads and you kind of, you’ve kind of scrubbed the bad ones. Is that the main differentiator?
Braden Pollock
Yeah. Well, it’s more than that. So there are, if we have a publisher that, so there’s a lot of sources. We have our own websites for generating leads, right. And then, and then we buy from you name it. Um, if we are buying from somebody that does not produce good leads, then we just stop buying from them. Right. So we, so if we sign up with a new publisher, everything stays in house initially. We pre-qualify those leads before we send them out because otherwise we’re, we’re kind of blindly sending these unproven leads to our clients and we’re not going to do that because it’s our reputation. Um, and so once that’s proven, then, um, then we put them in our system. They do route to clients, but we get instant feedback, right? Because a client doesn’t want to pay for a bad lead. So if we see bad leads starting to come from particular source, then we’ll take that whole source back in house and pre-qualify them before we send them to our clients. It costs us more money, obviously. But. It’s our reputation.
Chris Dreyer
Right? Right. So, yeah, that’s, that’s more time for you to go back and vet them instead of the direct, direct source. And, you know, are there, does your company offer, you know, territory, exclusivity, DMA, you know, is there are, because I know some of those companies I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m not, again, I’m not going to throw anyone of those under the bus, but some of those, those source, you know, five, 10 attorneys the same lead. And it’s just like, okay, whoever gets it first gets it. You know, how does, how does that part of your business work?
Braden Pollock
Yeah. So that, that company that would sell a lead 10 to 12 times, you obviously, you can’t do that. You know, they would sell it for $80, they would sell it for $2, right. Because they would retail it and they would sell it for $2 as if it was a backstop lead. Um, and they would just take anything. Right. And so, which is not sustainable because the, the people, the leads themselves, the people that are looking for a lawyer they’re pissed, right? When, when the phone rings the fourth time, the fifth time, the sixth time they’re mad. Right? And so now, if you are the eighth lawyer to call this person, they are not happy. And then that lawyer gets an ear full. That lawyer then calls us saying, what the hell you sold this lead eight times? They’re like, no, we didn’t, we sold it once. Right. And that’s true. But we bought it from somebody that’s sold it. It is many times as they possibly could. So, you know, Those leads, those relationships. We, we killed those relationships long, long time ago. And in there wasn’t sustainable. Even that company doesn’t even exist anymore.
Chris Dreyer
Got it.
Braden Pollock
It’s just bad, bad practices. So what we do is – if we are buying from a third party, we are buying it exclusively and that’s like, that it has to be the case. Because we need to be able to control what’s happening with this lead. You can’t be like, well, they’ve sold it a few times. Like, no, for sure. We’re buying exclusively now with us, you can buy from us exclusively or noexclusively. If it’s a nonexclusive, lead, that means we will sell it up to three times. Okay. So possibly to other buyers, but you know, this going into it. So that means you’re paying us whatever the number is. You’re paying us $65 instead of $95. Right. You’re paying less, but you’re sharing it. And so now it’s kind of a race to the finish, but, but everybody knows this going into it. You want exclusivity? You can pay more. And look and what we will tell lawyers when they ask, well, what should we do? Okay, well, who’s taking these calls. Do you have a call center? Do you have salespeople at the ready? Like that immediately respond to emails? Immediately call back? Are there to answer the phones? You are going to close more leads. You can be competitive. You can share that lead. You don’t have to buy it exclusively if you don’t want to, because you’re going to, you’re going to beat him to the punch, right?
Chris Dreyer
Yeah. Only that not only that. So, uh, a PI firm in the same market may have different criteria for the level of cases they take further soft tissue to major injury. So, you know, that could be a factor too. And the amount they’re willing to spend on a lead, you know, with, with those criteria, it may be much higher than, you know, the soft tissue. And that was kinda my, my next question was on pricing. You know, all, it all comes down to ROI and return on your investment, whether you’re doing PPC, SEO, whatever, you know, what other form of marketing in terms of direct response or direct lead gen. So. You know, the value of a lead in St. Louis. And I always had this debate with a lot of, a lot of individuals, a lot of people in our industry. The value of a lead in St. Louis for car accident is different than the value in say Los Angeles, right? Yeah. Much larger market, more competition. So is your, is your pricing model, do you differ by, uh, by geography or is it just a fixed cost on your MVAs? And that’s what the cost is?
Braden Pollock
You know, I believe MVA is one cost across the board and…
Chris Dreyer
Wow. Gotcha. Gotcha. So, you know, being in business 16 years, obviously you’ve vetted, you know, the best sources and, and kind of, uh, you know, my, my final question on this is, is, you know, how are you positioning this company for growth? Is it more about acquiring new sources for the leads and setting up those relationships? Is that the, is that the main component? I know you don’t do the day-to-day, but, but overall vision, I’m sure you’re highly involved in that.
Braden Pollock
Yeah. So, so, uh, a couple, um, a couple of ways. So we are at the moment we are, we’re layering on a wholesale component where we are buying in much larger volumes. Um, so we’re buying it wholesale and selling it wholesale. Right. And then, I mean, you kind of have to understand this industry. Everybody works together, right? Um, Nope. Nobody’s an island in this space. We we’re we’re, we’re all pinging each other and it doesn’t matter who generates this lead. It bounces around to everybody until somebody can place it. Right. Um, so there are, there are practice areas that have super high volume and, um, there are wholesale sellers and there are wholesale buyers, and, uh, well, we do both. And so we’re focused on some of those larger volumes, but we also have a retail sales team. Um, and a lot of lead gen companies don’t. They don’t retail. They don’t have a sales team. They don’t have customer service. They don’t have, they’re not charging credit cards every month. Right. It’s a different model and frankly, if I was to start over. I might take that model, right? Because I’ve got this big team of salespeople that are calling lawyers every day. Right. I’ve got a customer service people and account managers and, and, and an accounting department. And, you know, I’ve got all of this overhead that, um, that other companies don’t have it all right, because they just generate the lead and then wholesale off. And that’s it. Right. So we’re, we’re focused on building out this wholesale division. Um, and the advantage is we can also pull from that and retail, right? So now we have all this volume going through and the salespeople can look at that wholesale volume and pull some of those practice and practice area. And geo is out of that to retailer. Nice. Which increases our margin. But the wholesale margin is, is totally different, right? So it might be 5% or 10%, but in volume.
Chris Dreyer
Got it. Yeah. That makes sense.
Braden Pollock
And then layering on more practice areas. So when we started, we were DUI only for years, just DUI. And, and I was, I was the first company generate DUI leads. And, um, and we crushed the market. We built a giant website was a 40,000 page website when we launched and we just, we just crushed everybody. And so no matter where you were in the country, you had to come to us if you wanted to compete. Because even if you were number one, we launched our website and suddenly you’re a number two. Now SEO a little bit different nowadays. It’s not quite so easy, but, um, we did very well at the very beginning. And, um, and then I bought, uh, some, some other DUI sites kind of popped up after mine and I acquired them. Um, and so I just wrapped up that whole industry. And then over the years, it’s evolved, uh, into other practice areas that we’ve launched one at a time. Um, because it’s, it’s, it’s like going into a whole other industry, right. Just because they’re lawyers doesn’t mean like a bankruptcy lawyer doesn’t know a DUI lawyer doesn’t know an accident. And so one, one practice area time we roll out, the salespeople are out there making the calls, uh, or I’m I acquire a competitor or somebody that’s in that space. So, so for example, we got into traffic tickets a while ago. Uh, there was the, the biggest traffic ticket provider was called Ticket Void. Um, and we acquired it. Um, so it was, it was, uh, it was easy to fold in. Um, made sense to, to start selling traffic ticket leads and, and that client base, it was easy to upsell them with, with personal injury and criminal and auto accident and DUIs. Um, because most of those traffic ticket buyers weren’t solely traffic ticket. And then the traffic ticket inventory that hadn’t been sold, we were able to upsell our client base that we’re doing DUIs and auto accidents, et cetera. Um, so it was a pretty good fit and I’ve acquired a few companies that way and folded.
Chris Dreyer
Nice, nice. Yeah. I liked the acquisition strategy and in fact, that sits just an interesting strategy .And I’ve even looked at acquiring individual landing pages and do permanent 301 redirect after they had that ranking, so that’s a, that’s a whole different conversation. So yeah, I really liked that strategy and, um, Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s what it’s all about. And that’s how you get your, your margins to be able to sell these leads at a, and pay the price that your buyers will spend money on them because, you know, they have all these different ranges of, um, levels that they can make these investments at. You know, so, obviously, I mean, you’ve developed kind of this unique expertise and, and domain names and, and selling leads and, and the legal vertical, and kind of angel investing, you know, you particular, do you have a mentor that’s kind of guided you or, or is it more business books related? What who’s, who some of your mentors or some of your favorite business books?
Braden Pollock
I’m reading a Blitzscaling right now. Um, I’ve been working on that for awhile. Um, mentors, there’s no one really specific in the industry, um, that mentors it’s more, uh, kind of broad. So there’s a, there’s this attorney that I, that I worked with for many years at another business who, uh, he was fascinating about him, really, really bright guy. He taught me basically to dig a little deeper. Um, he was a guy that would just uncover stuff, you know, he, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t call the expert to try to hire the expert that you, you couldn’t hire. He would call the expert and say, who is it that you think, uh, you know, is really doing well in the field. Right. And that like, that’s the person you can hire. He would just learn how to dig down an extra couple of layers and taught me how to think of things a little bit differently and how, how to pay more attention and that kind of thinking of applied to everything that I do.
Chris Dreyer
That’s incredible. So that’s like, that’s where you’re out in front, on the domain names too. It’s just, you see these, you know, I noticed that it, wasn’t just not comms that you own. You own the new top level domains. You, the TLD is the dot attorneys, the dot, the dot lawyers and domains like that.
Braden Pollock
Well, yeah, so, so here’s, here’s the funny thing about that is, um, going a layer deeper. So you mentioned divorce. Attorney and I have, I have some, some names like that, some attorney names that, um, I didn’t buy them. Um, what I did was I did a deal with a company with a, with a registry before they launched and, uh, it’s, what’s called a founder’s program. And so they gave them to me if I was to promote the names, because I’m known in the investment industry, that domain investment community. So. I built them out and so that they had names, they had websites that they could when they launched their websites that were already built so they could showcase them. Um, they could announce to the domain industry that I had acquired a portfolio. Um, and then I wrote that deal. I wrote my wife into it. Who’s a well-known attorney and, uh, so she did some commercials. They sent a crew out to the office and she had some commercials, uh, with, uh, with those domains, um, uh, there are, um, I’ve done other, I’ve been in other founders programs. Um, and sometimes, so I mentioned q.org. For example, I bought a, a portfolio of single character .org names from the registry never been released before. So, so trying to buy stuff like this on the market, I just go straight to the registry and offer them enough money and, and, uh, write a business plan and, and, um, and make a plea and try to get them to sell me the names before they’d been released to the public. So, um, with .org and, uh .attorney, I use that strategy.
Chris Dreyer
Wow. That’s awesome. So, you know, you talked about kinda like your, your vision of seeing things and, and how you had this mentor where you dig a layer deeper. So what are your high value activities today? What, what are the actions that generate the most impact for your businesses?
Braden Pollock
Probably if I stay out of the way, um, all, all of my companies, uh, have a general manager or president that, um, I hire from within the industry. So these people oftentimes have more experience than I do. So, so legal brand marketing, for example, um, I started that myself in in my spare bedroom in my house, um, you know, I get up every couple hours and, and forward the, the lease manually because I didn’t have a CRM at the time. Um, but fast forward, the, the woman who runs that company, she’s been with me for 12 and a half years. Like who, who knows more about this business? She, you know what she does every day showing up to the office and dealing with staff or, or me, you know, she knows far more. They don’t, they don’t need me now, right? Now, we certainly talk about kind of the direction of the company, but not, not the day to day. Um, the, uh, director of business development, he’s been in the industry for 13 years. I was chasing after him for years to come to come work for me, it took a long time.
Chris Dreyer
That a, that wouldn’t happen to be Andy Northcutt right? Yeah. He’s definitely an a player. Yeah.
Braden Pollock
Right. So, I mean, everybody knows Andy in this space and I’ve, and I’ve known him since he was, I think it was just out of college and it was his first job. Um, he went to work for, for a guy that I knew competitor, but I worked with them. And so I, I knew Andy and all this time he’s been in this space. Um, and I was always trying to get him to work for me. So finally, he made the leap. Took years. Actually, I had to coax his wife into it first.
Chris Dreyer
So your, so your high value activities, you could say you find these a players, these integrators and they implement your vision and then kind of take over the day to day.
Braden Pollock
Yeah. Yeah. And I have other companies that, um, that, uh, I have an appointment later with, with the president of one of my companies that’s been in this industry, been in that industry for 40 years, 40. I can’t compete with that.
Chris Dreyer
I would say that’s a unique talent because most of us, most of us business owners, it’s tough to let go and to let someone else lead, right? We, we, you know, it’s the, E-Myth, you’re talking about manager maker. Uh Technician. I haven’t read it for a bit, but it’s like that last hat to become the owner instead of the manager. And that’s where I think a lot of us struggle. So that’s, that’s a really strong skill and it’s, it’s not common. Uh, for most, I would say most business owners.
Braden Pollock
Just to stay out of the way. I couldn’t do all the things that I do find them if I was, if, if I was trying to control everything. Um, and also finding good people. You know, frankly, it comes down to money, right? I mean, you, you just have to be willing to pay the going rate. Um, I mean, I like to think I’m a decent guy to work for as well. I mean, most, most of the people that work for me stay around for years. Um, and, and I think it’s because I, I appreciate, you know, the, their skillset and, and I let them make the decisions. Um, and, um, like I said, stay out of their way. They, and if they need me, right, they, they know how to find me and they can ask me questions, but otherwise I need to trust that they know what they’re doing.
Chris Dreyer
Braden is versed in so many areas of marketing and running an effective, scalable, and profitable business. I had to ask him what advice he had for personal injury lawyers out there looking to emulate even a fraction of his success.
Braden Pollock
I would say, certainly don’t be afraid to, to test, uh, people like yourself that do SEO. Um, I mean, if you, if you sit back and do nothing, you’re going to get crushed. Um, and, and the only way to grow is to, to continue trying new things, whether it’s SEO on your site or buying leads and these aren’t mutually exclusive. Right? So you, you, you can’t, you certainly can’t rely on. A third party to provide all of your business, right? That’s that’s not a smart move. You should be building your website and have your own brand and, and be competitive on your own. But buying leads you’re, you’re supplementing your business. To me, it’s craziness. Why someone would not want to buy leads. I’ve talked to people where they say, look, I’m reallocating this money to, you know, my own website and I want to generate leads on my own. I said, okay. I get that. However, you know, these leads, I’m still going to generate, they’re not going to sell, stop being generated because you’ve reallocated your, your, um, advertising. I’m going to now sell this to your direct competitor. So what’s that cost, right? So really the answer is, you need to do both. And the thing is that with what you do that takes time. Right. So somebody hires you and it takes you many months to get that website up and competitive, right? With leads. We turn you on and instantly you’re getting leads. We don’t have, the campaigns were built years ago. You’re going to get them immediately. Right. And, and that’s, that’s pretty meaningful that I send you a lead five minutes after you sign up. And now you have a real live client that you can sign right away as opposed to waiting months. So the answer is do both, but do something.
Chris Dreyer
Right, right. Absolutely. Multi-channel advertising. They all kind of work together too. You start in that helps to build your brand equity. You start being known, you know, you have more money to reinvest in all your different avenues because ultimately it’s all about attention and it’s, and it’s, there’s ROI built in. And that’s why you have these systems to acquire these sites that generate the leads at a price that you know, that your clients can still generate an ROI on. So it’s a win-win.
Braden Pollock
Yeah. So every single one of your clients. While you and I don’t compete. Right? Cause I don’t do SEO and you don’t sell leads, but you should be upselling your clients. You should be providing leads to them either, either buying and reselling them or referring them to someone like us. But everyone of your clients should also be buying leads to supplement what they’re doing with you.
Chris Dreyer
Even as an advocate for SEO, I have to agree with Braden, that lead generation is a great way to boost your immediate leads while your other digital marketing strategies come to pass in the future. I’d like to thank Braden from Legal Brand Marketing for sharing his story with us. And I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation. You’ve been listening to The Rankings Podcast. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you liked this episode or have an idea for future guests, whose story you’d like to hear, leave me a review and tell me more. I’ll catch you next week with another inspiring story and some SEO tips and tricks all with page one in mind.
